Mentoring

When you are a graduate student or a postdoc in our group you have the opportunity to enter into a mentoring process during your stay with us.

Mentoring is an approach to personal and professional development that introduces an independent and objective source of help outside and independent of the scientific supervision.

The idea is to have someone who is not your formal supervisor to talk to about your work and your aspirations. Hopefully, having a mentor will help you develop as an individual and person, not only professionally (which is the job of your supervisor) but also in terms of having a positive role in the group. Maybe most importantly a mentorship can help you think ahead to and prepare for your future job or continued studies.

The mentor-mentee relationship is characterized by:

• Occasional meetings between the mentor and mentee

• The driver is the mentee, who should arrange the meeting times, make an agenda for each meeting, and keep a log of what has been decided at a meeting, and how the decisions have been followed up.

• The themes of the mentor meetings should be restricted to the mentees professional situation, and it should not go into specifics of his or her research project (which is the responsibility of the supervisor).

• Confidentiality — At the first meeting between the mentor and the mentee, they have to agree that nothing talked about in the mentoring meetings can be disclosed to any other person.

• Your mentor cannot be your supervisor, but will be assigned from among the permanent staff of professors or associate professors.

When you start as a graduate student (MSc and PhD) or a postdoc in our group, you should approach Peder Klith Bøcher who will assign a mentor to you. After that it is your responsibility to contact the mentor and arrange a first meeting to get started.

When your time with the group is nearing its end, you should arrange for a “closing” meeting with your mentor to finalize and wrap up the mentoring process.